The Douglas County sheriff’s department set up roadblocks in the area that Thursday. Deputies manned the roadblocks through the day Thursday and until Friday morning. The investigators asked drivers if they had seen anything unusual Wednesday night.

Crime scene investigators trudged carefully through the field looking for anything that might help identify the suspect.

The evidence, including blood in the field, indicated that the young woman had been murdered where her body was found, explained Carl Whiteside, a Colorado Bureau of Investigation supervisor at the time. He was interviewed by Denver Post reporter Brad Martisius for the story on Jan. 18, 1980.

Denver police also joined the investigation because the radio intern was last seen at work in Denver. The news director of the radio station offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the killer.

Police would release a profile of her killer that was fairly generic.

“Pruszynski’s murderer was a young man, sexually immature, inadequate and angry at women. He probably came from a broken home where his mother was a dominant force. He apparently was very familiar with Englewood, and worked a menial job around here. He was a disruptive child, real macho, a non-conformist.”

Investigators searched school files for records of former and current disruptive students. They grilled RTD bus drivers. They looked through numerous traffic tickets, looking for violations involving souped-up vehicles.

Englewood Det. Capt. Ron Frazier also told Martisius that a man had sexually assaulted a young woman two weeks earlier after getting off a bus on South Broadway only a few blocks from where Pruszynski normally got off the bus.

The same night that Pruszynski had disappeared another woman claimed that at 6:15 p.m. a man attacked her on South Broadway. The man ran away when the woman screamed.

Authorities would soon reveal that there had been a series of unsolved murders in the area.

Another young woman had also been attacked, sexually assaulted and murdered 12 years earlier in March 1968. Constance Marie Paris, 18, disappeared after getting off a bus at South Broadway and Girard Avenue. She had taken a bus home from a Denver library. Her nude, battered body was found days later in southwest Denver. She had been strangled to death.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.